Warren Ellis has set sail for AfterShock Comics. An English writer known for Transmetropolitan, The Authority, Red and the Extremis storyline in Iron Man comics, Ellis will join artist Phil Hester and colorist Mike Spicer on Shipwreck, a six-issue miniseries that will debut Oct. 5.
Ellis previously worked with AfterShock CCO Joe Pruett at Caliber Press, making the transition an easy one. Shipwreck will feature Dr. Jonathan Shipwright, the sole survivor of a strange and secret shipwreck that leaves him lost and trapped on an “endless road.” Ellis says the story originally started out as an “odd notion” in one of his notebooks while on a long flight.
“Maybe the air pressure in the cabin was weird and it was affecting my brain,” Ellis told The Post’s Comic Riffs. “But [the story] wouldn’t go away. And it grew into this strange fable of a thing, of a shipwrecked traveler on the road, pursuing the man who caused the shipwreck in the first place.”
Ellis says each of the six issues that make up Shipwreck will have a self-contained story, as the people Shipwright meets along his journey may possibly hold the key to solving his personal mystery.
“Some of them have clues as to his situation, and the man he’s walking after,” Ellis said. “Jonathan Shipwright has secrets of his own, some of them deep inside him, and there are people who would like to extract them — physically, with tools.”
Despite having previous works adapted for film, Ellis does not write stories with Hollywood in mind, and scripting Shipwreck was no different.
“Writing things in expectation of a film or TV adaptation is a really good way to write really bad books,” Ellis said. “Let the books be what they want to be, and let other people worry about adapting them for other media.
“Put another way: Probably the most financially successful story I ever wrote was a 66-page story about an old man haunted by his own life, with a cast of four characters and four locations. That somehow became two films, with another film adaptation forthcoming from the Indian film industry, and that’s Red. So, you can’t really predict these things.”
